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All the more reason to spend time making small games without a goal of profiting from them in order to refine your skills. When things get more competitive, you

All the more reason to spend time making small games without a goal of profiting from them in order to refine your skills. When things get more competitive, you need to practice more, not less.

spywaregorilla 3y ago
I don't really agree that making and releasing unprofitable games is at all beneficial as "practice". "try harder, and suffer competition" is just bad advice. The real advice ought to be "don't work on games that don't have a legitimate reason to be successful besides being 'fun'", and have a strong consideration of market access, artistic hook, and value prop. Your ability to execute on a vision can be honed wherever the heck you want. But making the vision itself should come from studying games and what made them successful or not. Not grinding out business failures. My hot take would be online co-op, realistic graphics, first person games in a unique setting for about $25. Dicking around with your friends' avatars is fun regardless of game quality and the value prop is strong.
- deleted 3y ago
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- wingerlang 3y ago
  Anyone starting out with a realistic graphics fps game, with co-op, will 100% guaranteed either stop at the most basic unity coop game tutorial, or be a forever project that never actually releases. It just doesn't happen. > I don't really agree that making and releasing unprofitable games is at all beneficial as "practice". Out of curiosity, how many games have you made and finished?
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  - spywaregorilla 3y ago
    I've worked on several titles and completed none of them as a side hobby. I would like to finish one. I still work on it. My most important learning from this has been "don't do indie game dev for a living". Maybe you'll say "shut up then". But I disagree. Learning to execute on a game design vision is fun. But it is irrelevant if the vision is not viable. I've learned a lot through what I've done and it's vastly more fun to work on something you're interested in. If you chase the business side of actually releasing a game you're going to spend a lot of time doing things you're not interested in doing and it's potentially going to cost a lot of money. You have to figure out what you want to do. As for your dismissal of my comment, sure, it's a hot take. But I feel pretty strongly. Why? * Well for one almost every single game that people start does not get finished. So that's a misleading metric. * The amount of free 3D asset available are MASSIVELY better for 3D realistic assets. The lack of a specific art direction means you don't need to create everything from scratch. Which is bad if artistic design is your thing, but if it's not your thing, this is a lifesaver. Realistic 3D is the EASIEST art to acquire and prototype and even ship with unless you're interested in using very weirdly specific stuff from an asset store in a distinct style. * Co-op is intrinsically enticing and lowers the bar greatly for the game to be good. I think my ideal indie success story are games like The Forest and Green Hell. If you look under the hood, these games... pretty bad? Like it's mostly really dumb combat, basebuilding to basically no particularly well thought out game loop, and big maps with a small amount of unique content in them. But they're still pretty great to everyone who plays them. It's remarkably achievable. * Conversely, here's a game that was free on Epic a short while ago: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1766750/Spelldrifter/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1766750/Spelldrifter/ I thought this game was actually pretty solid. It's fighting system was interesting, the dialogue was decent even though I came into it knowing I wasn't going to care about the story, and the art was nice in my opinion. I liked playing this game. But there's now way I'm ever going to pay $20 for it. Standing out as a singleplayer game is extremely hard. Or comp multiplayer. Goofy co-op has a much lower bar because co-op is intrinsically fun when everyone's got an avatar.
    - wingerlang 3y ago
      > Learning to execute on a game design vision is fun. But it is irrelevant if the vision is not viable. I've learned a lot through what I've done and it's vastly more fun to work on something you're interested in. If you chase the business side of actually releasing a game you're going to spend a lot of time doing things you're not interested in doing and it's potentially going to cost a lot of money. You have to figure out what you want to do. I don't think we're saying completely different things. I am not advocating for making many commercial games where you release them and sink money into them. I am saying to finish games (that you like working on) instead of abandoning them. If you can't finish them, reduce scope until you can finish Pong even though that's not a viable game idea. Only then can you work your way up to your co-op multiplayer $$$ game. Even then, the games you mention have studios behind them with many people working on them.

All the more reason to spend time making small games without a goal of profiting from them in order to refine your skills. When things get more competitive, you need to practice more, not less.

spywaregorilla 3y ago

I don't really agree that making and releasing unprofitable games is at all beneficial as "practice". "try harder, and suffer competition" is just bad advice. The real advice ought to be "don't work on games that don't have a legitimate reason to be successful besides being 'fun'", and have a strong consideration of market access, artistic hook, and value prop. Your ability to execute on a vision can be honed wherever the heck you want. But making the vision itself should come from studying games and what made them successful or not. Not grinding out business failures. My hot take would be online co-op, realistic graphics, first person games in a unique setting for about $25. Dicking around with your friends' avatars is fun regardless of game quality and the value prop is strong.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wingerlang 3y ago
Anyone starting out with a realistic graphics fps game, with co-op, will 100% guaranteed either stop at the most basic unity coop game tutorial, or be a forever project that never actually releases. It just doesn't happen. > I don't really agree that making and releasing unprofitable games is at all beneficial as "practice". Out of curiosity, how many games have you made and finished?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- spywaregorilla 3y ago
  I've worked on several titles and completed none of them as a side hobby. I would like to finish one. I still work on it. My most important learning from this has been "don't do indie game dev for a living". Maybe you'll say "shut up then". But I disagree. Learning to execute on a game design vision is fun. But it is irrelevant if the vision is not viable. I've learned a lot through what I've done and it's vastly more fun to work on something you're interested in. If you chase the business side of actually releasing a game you're going to spend a lot of time doing things you're not interested in doing and it's potentially going to cost a lot of money. You have to figure out what you want to do. As for your dismissal of my comment, sure, it's a hot take. But I feel pretty strongly. Why? * Well for one almost every single game that people start does not get finished. So that's a misleading metric. * The amount of free 3D asset available are MASSIVELY better for 3D realistic assets. The lack of a specific art direction means you don't need to create everything from scratch. Which is bad if artistic design is your thing, but if it's not your thing, this is a lifesaver. Realistic 3D is the EASIEST art to acquire and prototype and even ship with unless you're interested in using very weirdly specific stuff from an asset store in a distinct style. * Co-op is intrinsically enticing and lowers the bar greatly for the game to be good. I think my ideal indie success story are games like The Forest and Green Hell. If you look under the hood, these games... pretty bad? Like it's mostly really dumb combat, basebuilding to basically no particularly well thought out game loop, and big maps with a small amount of unique content in them. But they're still pretty great to everyone who plays them. It's remarkably achievable. * Conversely, here's a game that was free on Epic a short while ago: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1766750/Spelldrifter/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1766750/Spelldrifter/ I thought this game was actually pretty solid. It's fighting system was interesting, the dialogue was decent even though I came into it knowing I wasn't going to care about the story, and the art was nice in my opinion. I liked playing this game. But there's now way I'm ever going to pay $20 for it. Standing out as a singleplayer game is extremely hard. Or comp multiplayer. Goofy co-op has a much lower bar because co-op is intrinsically fun when everyone's got an avatar.
  - wingerlang 3y ago
    > Learning to execute on a game design vision is fun. But it is irrelevant if the vision is not viable. I've learned a lot through what I've done and it's vastly more fun to work on something you're interested in. If you chase the business side of actually releasing a game you're going to spend a lot of time doing things you're not interested in doing and it's potentially going to cost a lot of money. You have to figure out what you want to do. I don't think we're saying completely different things. I am not advocating for making many commercial games where you release them and sink money into them. I am saying to finish games (that you like working on) instead of abandoning them. If you can't finish them, reduce scope until you can finish Pong even though that's not a viable game idea. Only then can you work your way up to your co-op multiplayer $$$ game. Even then, the games you mention have studios behind them with many people working on them.